HBase is called the Hadoop database because it is a NoSQL database that runs on top of Hadoop. It combines the scalability of Hadoop by running on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), with real-time data access as a key/value store and deep analytic capabilities of Map Reduce. This article introduces HBase and describes how it organizes and manages data and then demonstrates how to set up a local HBase environment and interact with data using the HBase shell.